“Did I once look like that?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Gregory said no one could paint this from me now,” Anna said slowly, as if to herself, not knowing that tears were falling down her cheeks.
“You are older, that is all,” said Everett, gently.
“No, that is not all. I have lost something which I had then.”
“We all lose something with our child-soul, Mrs. Burgess,” cried Everett, earnestly; “but you have gained more than you have lost. John Gregory was not fair to you to leave you with a word like that. You were a child then; now you are a woman. That face in my picture is not the face of a Madonna, yet. It did not seek to be, but we do not blame it for that. Should we blame the Mater Dolorosa that she has no longer the face of a child?”
“Thank you,” Anna said humbly, and held out her hand, which the young man caught in his and held with reverence.
She left the studio hastily, not daring to say more, a childless mother of sorrows. The very emptiness of her grief, since no sweet substitution of motherhood could be granted her, made it the more intolerable.
Instinctively she went from the Everett’s straight across the city to the unfashionable new quarter and to the Nicholses’ home. She found Mally’s baby properly cared for, but coldly, by hired and unloving hands, and took it into her own arms with yearning motherliness and cried over it, easing her heart and murmuring the tender nonsense, the artless art which mothers always know, but seldom women who have not known motherhood.
Mr. Nichols came in and she told him,—leaving the baby that she might surely control herself,—that on account of Madam Burgess’s feeble health it had been found impossible for her to carry out Mally’s wish and her own. The disappointment of the poor fellow, with his almost impossible burden and scanty income, was evident; but he rallied well, and showed a simple dignity in the matter which made Anna like him even better than she had before.